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Arts & Letters
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Satyajit Ray and our childhood n Rifat Munim
I
have long wanted to bring out issues solely dedicated to the genius of Satyajit Ray, the writer and filmmaker without whose creations our childhood would have been duller and less fun. Some of our most exciting moments were when we, as avid, adolescent readers of detective and thriller stories in a small town, would pay our visits to the small book stores in the bazaar area, twice or thrice a month. We’d always find something new from Sheba Prakashani, an ever fertile resource of children’s fiction. Even when there was no new Sheba title, there always were several piles of the old ones from which we could always rent at two or three takas each. But when news spread that a new Feluda had arrived -not one of those pirated copies, but the original with the cover and the inside paintings done by Ray himself -- each one of us would rush home to see where
ANNOUNCEMENT I’m very pleased to announce that Arts & Letters is going to revert to the monthly stand-alone format with a revamp. From now on A&L will come out on
the moms hid their purse and the dads put their shirts and pants, and to scour through them secretly for whatever remained in those pockets: a few coins or two or five taka notes. The Feludas were not as cheap as the Masud Ranas or the Tin Goyendas. So we had to put our brains and stolen money together. There were, of course, those consequences of being caught at times, with which came extra hours of reading on top of some heavy scolding. But there we were, braving all risks, and it all felt right, so right, because, after all, it was a new Feluda and we were desperate to be carried away wherever Topse, Lalmohan Babu and Feluda would take us to. But when we got hold of the book after going through so much, instead of fighting over it, we’d sit together to look through the pages that contained the drawings and illustrations, to take in the nuanced contours of the figures drawn and form a mental picture of a tall Feluda with a serious face and a short
the first Saturday of the month as a 16-page supplement with a wider range of articles and writeups on literature, music, films, theatre, painting and sculpture, and architecture.
Lalmohan Babu with a round face. We were equally excited when a new Professor Shonku arrived. But a detailed picture of those days should be saved up for another day. In this issue, Arts & Letters takes a look at some of Ray’s sketches, which were drawn neither for any book nor for any advertisement. These were sketches he had drawn before the shooting for Panther Panchali started. They tell us how he actually conceived the scenes, translating the setting, as described in the novel, into a sequence of visuals. They also tell us how Ray always gave us something of a multifaceted artwork, by enriching his literature and films with illustrations in some way or another. In the coming issues, we hope to run more stories and articles on other aspects of his genius such as his gift for composing music and writing lyrics and scripts. l The writer is editor, arts & letters.
The current four-page weekly format, we have realised, utterly fails to offer readers the variety and richness of our English writing scene that has seen a vibrancy in recent years with the emer-
gence of fresh new voices. We hope readers will like the new format and writers will respond by contributing new pieces. – Editor, Arts & Letters